The ballroom empties by midnight. Chandeliers dim, the stage lights fold into their cases, and a thousand napkins sit crumpled on round tables that cost more to rent for one evening than most people make in a month. Somewhere outside, past the valet stand and the security gate, the tide is already pulling in whatever the city threw away that week. Nobody in the room notices. That is the job of the night. But someone always has to ask what happens after the applause fades and the lights go dark.
Meet Freishia Bomanbehram
Freishia Bomanbehram is an actor, award-winning emcee, and event specialist who has hosted over 500 events for some of India’s largest corporations, and she is also the co-founder of the Carter Cleanup Movement and an eco investor in Full Power Energy Solutions. What sets her apart is not the stage presence, though thirteen years of hosting rooms full of CEOs proves that in spades. It is the fact that she treats a Mumbai beach with the same seriousness she treats a Mahindra boardroom.
The Stage Before the Sand
Freishia studied English Language and Literature at Jai Hind College in Mumbai, the kind of degree that teaches you to read a room before you ever learn to command one. Words came first. The stage came soon after.
Over thirteen years, she built a career hosting for names that most professionals only see on annual reports. The Birlas. The Piramals. The Mahindra Group, where she has now hosted for nine consecutive years. Each event added something. Each speaker she introduced left a mark.
“In this journey I have had the privilege of hearing some of the best speakers in the world. Each one has taught me values and a people first approach in everything that I do,” she says.
It is a quiet admission for someone whose entire job is to be the loudest voice in the room, but it explains everything that came after. The stage taught her to listen before it taught her to perform.
By the time EEMA named her Best Emcee in Gold and she won the Power Women Awards twice over, Freishia had already started noticing something the industry rarely talks about out loud. Every event she hosted ran on diesel generators, single use packaging, and a scale of waste nobody in the audience ever saw.
Full Power, Full Accountability
The story of Carter Cleanup did not start with a strategy deck. It started with a dog walk.
“A simple walk on the beach with my dog led me to see Harold, one of my co-founders, cleaning the beach alone during lockdown. That’s when I remembered that the beach that looked like a landfill was something that I played on as a child,” Freishia recalls.
She posted an Instagram story announcing a cleanup that Saturday. Five strangers showed up. They became her co-founders.
This is the tension that defines her work now. The events industry sells spectacle, and spectacle has a cost that rarely appears on the invoice. Freishia decided the mindset had to shift before the infrastructure could.
“The biggest misconception that people have is that someone came and dropped this waste on the beach. It is the high tide that brings in all this waste that had been illegally dumped in the first place,” she explains. She is candid that a single cleanup will not solve an ocean’s worth of plastic. But she has watched what it does to the people who show up with gloves and a trash bag for the first time.
“The mindset shift that automatically takes place, and people start realizing the gravity of the situation we are dealing with, that is why beach cleanups are needed,” she says. One recent cleanup with Barista Coffee Company pulled 710 kilograms of waste off Mumbai’s coastline in a single day, under a 42 degree heatwave, with 60 volunteers who stayed until the job was done.
Then came Full Power Energy Solutions, where Freishia is an eco investor bringing clean energy batteries to an industry still running on diesel. At the Maharashtra Police Games, her batteries avoided 22 generator sessions and saved 1,300 litres of diesel, the emissions equivalent of over a decade of tree absorption in a single event. “These batteries replace diesel generators in an incredible way. Lesser emissions, cost savings, it’s a win win for the events industry,” she says. For a woman who spent thirteen years standing on stages powered by the very thing she is now working to eliminate, it is not irony. It is unfinished business.
The Bomanbehram Playbook: 5 Lessons
Meet the mess before you fix it. Freishia did not research beach pollution, she showed up with a dog and found someone already cleaning it alone.
Recruit through honesty, not marketing. Her Instagram story asking for help built the co-founding team of Carter Cleanup before any formal pitch existed.
Correct the story, not just the shoreline. She insists on educating people that beach waste arrives on the tide from illegal dumping, not from beachgoers, because the wrong narrative kills the right solution.
Bring your industry’s blind spot into your own hands. She did not lecture event organizers about diesel, she became an investor solving the problem herself.
Let proximity build conviction. Nine years of watching Mahindra’s leadership up close shaped her belief in a people first approach more than any single speech ever could.
Full Circle
The ballroom will always empty by midnight. That part of the industry Freishia works in is not going away, and she has never asked it to. What she asked instead was a harder question: who takes responsibility for what the night leaves behind.
Freishia found her answer on a beach she used to play on as a child, holding a trash bag next to strangers who did not yet know they would become her co-founders. She found it again on a police games field, watching a battery do what a diesel generator used to do, quietly and without apology.
She has spent her career making sure a room feels something before the lights come up. Now she is making sure the tide feels something too.
Freishia Bomanbehram is the Founder of Full Power Energy Solutions and Co-founder of the Carter Cleanup Movement, based in Mumbai, India. She hosts corporate and brand events across industries while driving environmental advocacy through sustainable event solutions and community cleanup initiatives. To connect with Freishia or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile.
